


Smokescreens

by InkStainedFingers



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: A Complicated Relationship, Battle of Crait Aftermath, Bitter Exes, Kylo Ren is Not Nice, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Post-TLJ, Power Imbalance, Sort Of, Supreme Leader Kylo Ren, but they're tired, in a memory, not exactly happy but not exactly hopeless, they're terrible
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-06
Updated: 2018-08-06
Packaged: 2019-06-23 00:56:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15594678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InkStainedFingers/pseuds/InkStainedFingers
Summary: “I’m tired, Supreme Leader,” Hux tells him, peevish, dangerously close to a dismissal.“So why aren’t you sleeping?” he replies carelessly.The look that Hux darts him from under his eyebrows is poisonous and altogether too familiar. It is not the sort of look that Hux would ever have dared show the former Supreme Leader.“Let me see,” Ren orders.On Crait, the galaxy had tilted. Later, in private, they try to find their footing again.





	Smokescreens

**Author's Note:**

> So I'm very, very late to the TLJ aftermath party, but I got there in the end. The idea of these two being left with nothing but each other at the top is super interesting. They're awful but they kinda need each other. Also I have never seen any villains more exhausted let them sleep.
> 
> Just a note for you folks - this does deal with the physical result of Kylo mistreating Hux, meaning that there is a lot of bruising and such and Kylo is rather fascinated, but not in a kinky sense (unless you want to interpret it like that). He's trying, in his own messed up way.

Even back in the days when this was almost regular, Hux never liked to be taken by surprise. Ren feels a shadow of amusement to think of how much less he must like it now, unexpected, months after their arrangement had fizzled out under the weight of mutual resentment, and with Ren his new-minted leader. He had not bothered to request permission to enter, merely applied his thoughts to sliding back the door. He finds Hux sitting at his desk in the dark anteroom, lit from beneath by the electric light of his datapad. It highlights his angles, blue and stark. His black robe is wrapped tight around him, held closed at the throat.

“I’m tired, Supreme Leader,” Hux tells him, peevish, dangerously close to a dismissal.

“So why aren’t you sleeping?” he replies carelessly.

The look that Hux darts him from under his eyebrows is poisonous and altogether too familiar. It is not the sort of look that Hux would ever have dared show the former Supreme Leader. The impudence of it pricks him into asking for what, until now, he had not felt bold enough to demand.

“Let me see,” Ren orders. Something nervous and savagely excited hums under his skin. He has never had this chance before, to see what effect his grandfather’s favoured intimidation technique has on the naked flesh, the physical evidence of it. Hux’s gaze drops, his mouth still set resentfully, but his grip on the opening of the robe loosens until it slides down the curve of his neck. The bruising is even and thick, the colour of storm clouds and stark against Hux’s pale skin, with some parts beginning to yellow at the edges. It looks more violent than Ren had expected. He wishes he had demanded to see it earlier, when it was new.

“I said, let me see,” he repeats flatly.

Hux glowers, but lets the robe fall from his narrow shoulders to catch at his elbows and around his waist. The marks on his upper arm and ribs from the ship wall are patchier, more colourful. Ren traces them with his gaze, the dark red smudged with sickly green and purple-black, watching tiny bumps rise on the skin. Though he has seen it before - knew it once, even – the fragility of Hux’s body always comes as something of a surprise to him. Thin as a slip of paper. Someone said that once, someone whose words have stuck in Hux’s mind like splinters.

Ren lifts a hand and brushes his fingertips over the yellow fringe bruises where Hux’s neck meets his white shoulder, light as a shadow. Hux flinches from his touch, only very slightly, before mastering himself and stilling under Ren’s hand, tipping his chin up proudly. Something clenches unexpectedly in Ren’s chest. Hux has never feared him before. Hux, a man whose arm Ren could snap without effort and with as much Force sensitivity as a rock, had never so much as trembled in the face of Ren’s most violent wrath throughout their co-commandership. Ren had hated it.

“You used to enjoy my company, General,” Ren remarks, making an effort to sound idle.

“It wasn’t your company I was enjoying,” Hux counters, snide. “Supreme Leader.”

He tugs his robe up tight around his neck again so that it nudges Ren’s fingers off him. Ren thinks back to the last time they’d fucked, in the chaotic aftermath of the Starkiller disaster. He’d woken from the bacta tank scarred but without pain, filled instead by a restless, humming chemical energy left over from the accelerated healing process. Despite his craving to forget, scraps of memory from his rescue off the breaking surface of the planet had clung to him. He had fully expected to find Hux standing over him in the medbay with a gloating sneer, ready to recount all the ways in which Ren’s failures had led to this catastrophe, but the General was instead conspicuous by his absence. Ren had clothed himself and stormed to the bridge to demand information. He was informed tremulously that he had been out for two cycles, that they were headed for the _Supremacy_ , and that it was the General’s off shift.

Even then it had been a long time since he had last visited Hux’s private quarters, but the door had slid open for his sweeping gesture as compliantly as it ever had done in the past. He had found Hux sitting at his desk in his undershirt and breeches, hands shaking around a cup of bitter tea, hair spiked and ruffled where he must have been clutching it. His eyes had taken on that manic edge that sometimes made Ren wonder exactly how far from real insanity his co-commander was fixed. They were red-rimmed and bloodshot, the skin around them darkened with purple smears of exhaustion against the pallor in his cheeks.

Maker, how easy it had been to desire him then. The two of them had come together, desperate and afraid, frantic for something neither of them could name. Their clothes littered the floor and he had seen Hux’s fingers twitch with the urge to pick them up and fold them, but he hadn’t. Instead he had followed Ren into his own ‘fresher to make use of the hot running water, an officer’s luxury. They had sealed the door behind them, enclosing them both in a space tight and warm enough that it almost felt safe, as though steel and shower steam could hide them from Snoke. Ren had sluiced the remaining bacta from his hair while Hux’s thin fingers fluttered over his fresh red scars, his newly-knitted flesh.

With skin water-buffeted until it was blush pink and sensitive, it was difficult for Ren to take his mouth off Hux, later when they had finally reached his bed. Hux had looked like a different person entirely to the fearsome General of the First Order, delicate-boned and slight in his nakedness, his hair loosened by the hot water, beginning to dry in damp strands that fell around his eyes. Some gentle madness seemed to have taken them both, one that hungered for comfort and had no pride. Ren had gone so slowly, with Hux under him warm and pliant as butter, his long legs folded around Ren’s hips. His hands no longer shook but gripped weakly at Ren’s shoulders or combed through his hair with an intimacy that made him shiver as much as their joining.

The noises Hux had made were ruinous. In the past he was often loud, demanding, critical, but that cycle his sighs had been trembling, half moaned and silk-soft, barely stirring the thick air. Ren had wanted to swallow them. It was repulsive, it was intoxicating. There are cycles when he wakes with those sounds in his ears still, and he has to handle himself briskly before he can begin the shift with any kind of focus.

When he had awoken that cycle, his arms were empty, he had not set foot on the bridge for fourteen hours and Snoke’s ship was in sight. They had barely had a civil exchange since. It was not so long ago really, but it feels as though years have passed since those delirious hours. They may as well have; Hux feels so far away from him, even with the scant inches between them. Perhaps this is what it means to be Supreme Leader. To be alone, as he had thought he was before.

“I killed Snoke. It was me, not the scavenger girl,” he confesses in a rush, defensive. “I did it.”

Hux’s face is blank. If he is shocked, if he is angry, Ren cannot see it. He burns to dip into Hux’s mind and know, so he does, but all that is there to be felt is exhaustion, thick and blinding as fog.

“He was inside me. Always. I was – a tool for him. He said he knew my every thought, that he could control me. But he couldn’t. I ripped him out. With my own hands.”

He delivers this stilted explanation to the back of Hux’s neck. It has always fascinated him, the thin and enticing stretch of skin above the General’s collar. It had seemed so naked, vulnerable, open for a blade or a bolt, or for teeth to close on it. Ren had made sure that the back of his own was never visible outside of his quarters.

“And now there’s no one.” Ren finds Hux’s eyes again with these words hanging in the air between them. His expression is impassive. It is difficult to tell what he has understood from this; a threat, a secret, a plea. Ren hardly knows what he had meant himself.

“I thought of killing you,” Hux tells him evenly. “When I found you there.”

Ren nods, once, easing out a breath he had not realised he had caught in his chest. It is not a betrayal that has any sting, knowing Hux as he does, for a fickle, ambitious, scheming thing.

“I would have done the same.”

Hux lifts an eyebrow. “No, you wouldn’t.”

Ren’s temper sparks again and before he has so much as thought about it his hand is tight around the purpled back of Hux’s neck. His skin feels so thin, his pulse throbbing under Ren’s thumb. Perhaps he should kill Hux after all, just for that, for the presumption and for the thought of pointing a blaster at him and for everything he knows now from Ren’s own mouth. For being right on Crait and for ever having gasped _Kylo, oh Kylo_ , soft and so helplessly undone. It would be easy.

“Would you ever have followed my command, had I been in your place?”

“Is that what you do, General?” he growls.

“I do what is best for the Order.”

“You think that following my command is what is best for the Order?”

Hux’s gaze flicks sideways to meet Kylo’s. His eyes are the colour of a distantly-remembered sea, and distressingly clear.

“I think that a stable power structure is what is best for the Order. For now.”

This open ambition is oddly soothing. It is the closest to honesty he is likely to get. His grip slackens until it is soft, almost fond. The pad of his thumb caresses the small, intimate space behind Hux’s earlobe and then smoothes down over the start of the bruising, gently, gently.

“Forgive me.”

Hux only sighs. Forgiveness is not in either of their natures and it seems he is not in the mood to give hollow answers to hollow requests. Kylo softens his touch still more, trailing his fingertips through the bruises that he put there, that have burst under Hux’s skin. Ren remembers being told once that some Force users could heal with their touch. He wonders what it would look like, if the skin under his fingers would clear instantly, or if the colours would swirl like a nebula. He wonders whether he would even do it, if he could.

“Ren,” Hux says, quiet and tentatively confessional. “Ren, I’m tired.”

“Yeah,” Ren replies. He swallows. Hux’s skin has warmed sweetly under his hand. “Me too.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
